On the Road (or) On the Couch

You know what I fear more than anything? Leading an irrelevant life. Me being born, living, and dying, not amounting to a hill of beans. Dead and already buried above ground. There is a lot of ego in this, the need to be somebody, to gain admiration of the other. Yet, even after all of that sin is subtracted, there is a pure essence of wanting to matter, to mean something. Not to be erased by the pencil of eternity after I put my # 2 down that one last time.

Perhaps that is why I am compelled to write. Someone in college once gave me an off-handed compliment of sorts. He said that I had a "will to write" or something to that effect. Not that I was a great writer, but that I had a drive to write. There is something permanent about words...Jesus said that His words, and ours, would never pass away. The universe takes notes.

I don't think I missed my calling to be an English teacher. Although I adore books and love to write, the idea of grading essays and teaching the same books year after year would depress me to ashes. My literary fires extinguished by red pens and midnight grading of kids' work who might not care. Instead, I relish great stories, bad grammar, profound thoughts, and rambunctious humor. Printed energy emanating from the page like a strobe light.

I have been working on a book about college transition for about three years now. I want the book to make a difference, to shake things up. Take the status quo and kick it in the ass. Ask serious questions. I absolutely refuse to write a "Christian" book that is just prepackaged moralism. That is one sure recipe to turn off both Christians kids who already know many of the right answers despite being practically biblically illiterate, or, to not engage non-Christian kids to think about their lives beyond texting, iTunes, and Facebook statuses, and tweets.

I have a dream that my book might just be heavy...heavy enough to impress upon young minds that life is a profound adventure, one where we go around once, so we might as well press down the accelerator of excitement and experience rather than settle for the back-seat of the mundane.

I read this quote this weekend:

“Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.”                                                                                               Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums 

The Prophet Kerouac, pre-Comcast. For $ 150 per month, we get 150 channels. And 150 ways to waste our time and lives.

I promptly ordered the book above. Any novel that uses the word crapulous (over-consumption) is well on its way to getting an award. Here's the deal. How many of us use television as the medium to the "might have been life?" Rather than eat an exquisite meal in Vietnam, we watch it on a foodie show. Rather than score a winning basket, we watch LeBron pass the ball to a teammate to take the last shot? Instead of having interesting and deep conversations with friends, we would rather listen and watch a bunch of actors throw out one-liners? We sigh from the crapulous couch and sigh, "Is this all that life is? A dull distraction from the itch of angst, somehow knowing that the hour-glass winds down in half-hour increments, or twenty-three minutes--minus the commercials. Thrills.

I like great films, and other work. But what passes for entertainment is amusing, often inane, but hardly anything that contains great and transcendent truth. It is just trifling and temporal misdirection media. Steering us away from difficult themes and provocative ideas, towards the predictable hum-drum of what passes for fancy for a time. Life should be more because it is more.